While there are ongoing projects, it is still not an alternative on par with other clean energies.
The visionary Jules Verne considered hydrogen as the fuel of the future when he stated in his 1874 novel “The Mysterious Island”: “I believe that one day water will be a fuel, and that the hydrogen and oxygen it comprises, used alone or together, will provide an inexhaustible source of energy and light with an intensity that coal does not possess.”
The day prophesied by Verne seems to arrive 150 years later, and today governments and companies worldwide have created a multi-billion-dollar industry to commercially produce hydrogen as the fuel of the future, aiming to replace fossil fuels like oil, gas, and coal and win the race against climate change. However, despite “hydrogen emerging as the fuel of the future because it is the most abundant element in the universe, comprising 75 percent of gas,” many questions persist, acknowledges Colombian-German scientist Jürgen Guerrero Kommritz from the University of Hamburg, speaking to EL TIEMPO.
It says that it has been following the hydrogen topic for more than 30 years, but the issues remain unchanged. Economic giants like BlackRock, a US-based multinational investment firm headquartered in New York, “which owns almost everything on the planet, do not invest in this, and politicians are sold out and controlled by fossil energy consortia.”
Furthermore, it is unclear “how hydrogen is produced in the Earth’s crust,” and there are doubts about the commercial production of hydrogen as a fuel due to high prices, a lack of political will to promote it, and the limited enthusiasm shown by most major oil companies, among other things.
That’s why he asserts that although hydrogen discoveries sound very promising, “they are fossil deposits that will run out quickly, and at the moment, there is no way to quantify them as is the case with gas, oil, and coal. All of that is under research.”
The biggest problem regarding the commercial production of hydrogen, in his opinion, “is that there is no production and distribution infrastructure. Furthermore, all energy consortia based on oil, gas, and coal do not want to lose their market and do everything possible to prevent this type of new energy from establishing itself.”
“In the 1980s, the German Aerospace Center (DLR) created a program to build a giant solar power plant in the Sahara Desert and produce hydrogen that would then be pumped through pipelines to Europe for industrial use. However, the initiative was modified and resulted in the Desertec project, which no longer aims to export hydrogen but rather electricity from the Sahara Desert,” he explains.
Hydrogen economy
Guerrero argues that for a hydrogen economy to be created, “only renewable hydrogen, the green ones obtained from electrolysis or solar thermonuclear fusion from water, would be useful. It would be the easiest and cheapest.”
“The use of hydrogen would be in engines that burn it directly to obtain mechanical energy, heat, and water, or by using fuel cells in which, through a chemical reaction, electricity and water are obtained. The great advantage is that pure water would be extracted from the process, and that is why it would be a highly coveted asset,” he specifies.
Therefore, what really has a future, in his opinion, “is the production of hydrogen through wind energy.” He mentions that Denmark “plans to build a hydrogen island in the North Sea that would produce hydrogen from water and pump it ashore through a pipeline.”
“The use of hydrogen would solve the issue of fluctuating energy production through wind power, as large quantities of the gas can be produced during months of high wind intensity and stored for use during low periods. This would also regulate energy supply and eliminate the need for batteries, which would have to be periodically replaced,” he adds.
Another mechanism for hydrogen production could be utilizing the thermal difference of the ocean in large floating plants like Otec (Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion), which use the temperature difference between surface and deep-sea water to generate electrical energy that would be used to produce hydrogen.
“On the Colombian island of San Andrés, there is a proposal to use one of these plants, but there is no political vision to build it,” Guerrero reveals.
Commercial hydrogen production requires “splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen, a task that requires energy. If fossil fuels are used for this, the process generates greenhouse gas emissions, and the result is called gray hydrogen. Utilizing renewable electricity from wind turbines and solar panels to produce the so-called green hydrogen is cleaner,” states The New York Times in an article on the subject.
There are various types of hydrogen; “white or neutral” ones are fossil fuels, “green” ones come from renewable energy sources, mainly water or biomass through bacterial action. Light gray hydrogen is produced in hydroelectric plants, while dark gray and black ones come from the coal, oil, or gas industry,” explains Guerrero.
Various processes are also being developed to obtain the gas, such as geochemical, geothermal, and bacterial processes.
Currently, the majority of hydrogen comes “from petroleum refineries and is obtained through petrochemical processes. The idea is to use hydrogen from other energy sources, such as water electrolysis, utilizing renewable energies like wind, solar, and geothermal power,” obtained “from harnessing the existing heat within the Earth,” Guerrero specifies.
For other researchers, the hydrogen fuel topic only gained attention from 1987 onwards when, by accident, a water well containing the gas caught fire in the town of Bourakébougou, a small village in Mali, which has been supplied with energy from hydrogen for more than a decade.
Reserves and actions
Various reports claim that natural hydrogen reserves have been detected in the United States, Australia, Africa, Russia, and Europe, and it is easily found in gas or oil drilling.
“The incredible geothermal potential of Colombia (the entire Central Cordillera) and the 90 known volcanoes could be used to produce geothermal energy. The Caribbean Sea and the Pacific Ocean could be used for OTEC plants, and with its abundant water resources, a hydrogen economy could be created to provide clean water to all those with a power cell, simultaneously addressing a public health issue. However, it lacks political vision, making it a utopia,” Guerrero asserts.
The independent energy company Gold Hydrogen, after discovering historical documents in two oil wells drilled in 1930 showing the existence of large amounts of pure hydrogen, is currently working to find natural gas near Adelaide, Australia.
“Bill Gates is one of the American investors who have funded Koloma, a Colorado-based company searching for hydrogen in a massive geological rift in the Midwest. In Europe, small energy companies from Spain, Switzerland, the Nordic countries, and others are exploring the Earth’s crust,” according to The New York Times.
Helios Aragón, a Spanish startup, is developing a project to produce natural hydrogen in the Pyrenees mountain range, which separates the Iberian Peninsula from the rest of Europe.
Oil-producing countries are also working on hydrogen. For example, Saudi Arabia plans to become one of the world’s largest producers and exporters of gas to replace oil revenues. The country is developing the Neom mega-project in the Tabuk province in the northwest, which includes, among other things, a smart linear eco-city called The Line. However, experts consulted by the Nature magazine argue that, despite marketing The Line as the city of the future, it will actually be a nightmare and a disaster. They believe its colossal size and linear structure will make mobility and livability a nightmare. “There are reasons why humanity has 50,000 cities in some circular way,” noted Rafael Prieto-Curiel, a postdoctoral researcher at the Mathematical Institute of the University of Oxford and a visiting researcher at Eafit.
Like the mentioned examples, there are other large-scale proposals for hydrogen production. For instance, Iceland aims to develop a gas-based economy by 2030 and is already using hydrogen-powered vehicles. “With its abundant geothermal energy and new techniques for harnessing this energy, it is very feasible for Iceland to export hydrogen in the early next decade,” predicts Guerrero.
The United States and Europe have allocated billions of dollars to subsidize the development of green hydrogen from renewable energies.
Julien Moulin, president of Française de l’Énergie, a clean energy company, told The New York Times, “People had not been looking for natural hydrogen for years and years because everyone was focused on oil and gas extraction,” but now “we are at the beginning of a new dynamic.”
In the face of obstacles hindering green gas production, we recall the famous phrase asserting that the earth provides man with enough to meet his needs but not to satisfy his greed.
SOURCE: EL TIEMPO – GLORIA HELENA REY
Original article in Spanish:Â Â
https://www.eltiempo.com/vida/medio-ambiente/el-hidrogeno-una-gran-esperanza-que-avanza-a-paso-lento-849199
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